Tag: big cheeses

Being Off the Map

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In general people have a fairly fixed idea about how the world is, how people behave and what is expected. Which is a nice way of saying that people are prejudiced. The fact that I resigned my job at a decent university without any other, better job to go to, was for many a non sequitur. They could not get their head around it. It did not compute. Some invented some imaginary scandal to explain it, scandal ever being bread and butter in perfidious Albion.

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People do not associate words on perception and meditation with a smoking skinhead bovver-boy. Nor do they image that a piss artist front row rugby player can chant in deep voice. People are set in their ways and their minds are a tad concrete.

I quite like having more than one working explanation for any given situation. I do not have to settle in any absolute way for which one is “right”. Modern education insists on getting the socially accepted “right” answer to exam questions. Students want to learn how to produce and parrot the “right” answer so as to get “A” levels and degrees. People are trained to think in an absolute binary right-wrong way.

The most logical explanation from a socio-political point of view is that I am simply a burn-out who could not hack it with the big boys, the big cheeses.

Another explanation is that I am off the map. I differ significantly in orientation from most. I just don’t fit. I am a square peg which cannot be hammered into a round hole. No drama. People have long been wary of things which have not been mapped out.

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This means that only the foolhardy might seek to touch me with a barge pole. I could be infectious. Association with me could be career threatening.

I have been told by others that people do not want to be seen associating with me in public.

There is no incentive in a “what-is-in-it-for-me” sense to interact with me in any way, whether meaningful or otherwise.

I will likely remain off the map, uncharted.

People can choose to choose whatever it is they want to choose. Their choice is their choice. I have no wish to influence. If they make poor choices that is not my problem. I never advised them and they never sought my advice. People need to learn in whichever way helps them to learn.

This notion of standing back, non-interference, is neutral. It is nether life enhancing nor life destructive. It is an approach which does not make sense to others who wish to interact, to impinge, to affect and to influence. Some cannot resist trying to guide the lives of others and bend them to their will.

Non-interference is a direct consequence of emptiness, lack of will or ambition, is not on the map of modern ways of living. It is not there in “opportunity” land. After all “opportunities” should and must be seized!!

Why?

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English Village Parish Meeting Dream 22-08-2025

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Here is this morning’s dream. It is out of context. We did however watch “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” the other day and I once helped a NIMBY protest against an incinerator build for a Buckinghamshire village.

The dream starts on a small, grassed square outside a red brick village church / parish hall. Despite being made of very dark red brick and flint the building is centuries old. A special parish / village meeting has been called. It is very important for the village as there is some unknown sense of danger which needs discussed and a plan needs to be made. Under the thatched roof of the “bus stop” around a pub table are sat a couple of women my age. One of who is of Indian origin. They are discussing a recipe in poor French, Franglais. It is all village fete, quintessential even. I am sat on one of the park benches with the wife. Everyone is invited especially those who do not attend church. The vicar has made the church available and the town council committee has sent out invites.

Inside the church the angling club is holding a meeting. We are relatively new to the village, the first thing of interest / excitement to happen there in a very long time. It being a small village the word has gotten about. There is some expectation of me. That in some way I will play a role perhaps an important role. I have been pressed to come by some of the village “elders”. As the village gathers the hubbub increases. The young farmers from outside the village bounds are chatting excitedly. They are opposite us sat on a low wall. They have a slight schism with the influx of townies. The head of the angling society opens a window on the side of the church and tells everyone to be quiet. They have important business.  The middle finger of my right hand extends downwards in a gesture. The farmers note this. The wife is mortified but my gesture has gone down well.

One of the famers, whose family have lived in the village long, says to me, eye to eye, that the head of the angling society is a “right wanker” in a slight west country accent. The famers start calling out “come on you toss pot we have got things to do, hurry up so that we can get started.” This has broken the ice in the assembling villagers. The man closes the window. We can hear chat inside and know that the meeting has been called to a close. The head of the society was once a big cheese in the village but his stock has fallen of late. Before the doors to the church are opened everyone starts to make their way into the hall.

The dream ends.

Who Do You Take Seriously?

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I’ll start this off with two omissions.

Of late we have heard a lot of the orange-drone-voice-man and his quest for Swedish Krona. The body language of his interaction with Vlad the Impaler has been dissected, no doubt for a fee, in various outlets. Not one of them has thought to mention that Putin is a dan grade judoka. Probably none of these body-language experts have been on the mat. If like Putin you are a lifelong judoka you cannot but help assessing where the centre of gravity of people is. This includes during handshakes. Instinctively one adjusts position and weight to see how another responds. A player of with-caddy-cart 18 hole golf has a different mentality to a judoka. Always there is an inkling of what throw one might attempt. A golfer might not anticipate this. Putin might one day step in for an Ipponseionage and bam…Putin will always be a judoka to the core.

Unless I am mistaken the history of the tribes of Israel as per the old-testament speaks of the wrath and retribution of God. There is Divine intervention on a biblical scale. Right now Israel is going biblical on Gaza. Maybe they have checked this out with God and he is on board, maybe not. If he is unhappy with this bellicose vengeance he might have to intervene. I have not heard this aspect discussed. But large scale divine intervention is a part of their religious hagiography. Maybe God is no longer as important as Netanyahu.

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As an old fart in rural Brittany there is no reason why anyone might take me seriously, even were my observations apt and applicable. This is because I am not famous nor am I a big cheese. I do not have thousands of followers on this internet thingy. If you are a nobody, nobody takes you seriously. You have to have a gang, a club, a peer group or be properly institutionalised. It is possible that people who have been in the same institution for several decades might imagine me the lunatic!! Life has a few quirks.

I don’t think that golfer boy is noting a shift in the way the world is. He is a bit too stuck in the past. He does not have a wide encompassing view of humanity as a whole.

As a rule of thumb people give the most credence to people who are relatively close to them physically, their colleagues, who think in a similar manner. They like what they hear back so they take it seriously. Anyone outside can be seen as misguided, an enemy even. Their views and opinions are not taken seriously, they are discounted. Even people who know intellectually about this prejudice cannot resist it. It is a fundamental flaw of group-think and group-mind. Peer “pressure” is way more powerful than we care to acknowledge. The desire to not rock the boat and to comply is endemic.

“Which idiot would dare to put their head above the parapet?”

If anyone did, they would only be taken seriously posthumously and in retrospect. Genius is most often ascribed posthumously and with hindsight. Rarely is it proclaimed in vivo. Everyone knows this and yet repeats history by non-acceptance and in some cases derision.

Things must not be too different in order to be taken seriously!

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The obvious question here is why do unicorns always point to the right?

Some people do not like those who have a different perspective from them, they resist hearing it and in any way assimilating. They just can’t or won’t take divergent views seriously.

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Do people have to see the world in a similar way to you in order for you to take them seriously?

Must everyone think just like you?

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Hegseth – Metreweli – Dream Snippet 19-06-2025

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This snippet follows on from a feeling of having at edge of consciousness.

Yesterday afternoon late I had a strong sensation of Peter Hegseth at the periphery of consciousness, there was an awareness of him meeting Trump. And then subsequently just him.

This from late last night.

The snippet starts with some kind of “zoom” like call between the USA and London. For whatever reason Hegseth is talking with Ms. Metreweli the head of MI6 in waiting. I know her face from the news. Even more bizarrely I am somehow linked to this conversation. This conversation goes on for a while. They are developing their working relationship and understanding.

The snippet ends. I am surprised that these should spring into the dreaming.

On waking this morning, I look up the name of the new head of MI6 and read a wiki page about Hegseth.

I look up my uncle’s MBE citation and see it was signed my Major General J M Kirkman who was head of Military Intelligence Berlin in 1950. The implication being that my uncle was MI too.

The feeling this morning is that something weirdly masonic is in the air.

Big Cheeses and Kudos

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I’ll speculate that Herr Trump sees himself as a big cheese and wants people to kiss his ring. The orange don, Donald, has a big army, navy and air force. I doubt anyone looks forward with unbridled glee at the notion of a public meeting with him. These meetings are a necessary evil. He is not a pleasant man. In societal terms he is a high kudos being, though some may not wish to brag about their associations with him. He is not universally good PR. He can be bad for business. He has a lot of power.

Kudos is context specific. To a MAGA wannabe an endorsement from the “don” is manna from heaven.

We are watching recorded University Challenges on YouTube. Quite often there are questions on Nobel Prizes and Laureates. These prizes are high kudos and should you win one it will boost an academic salary and secure your job. Universities like the kudos of bragging about Nobel Laureates.

“Look at us we are special!”

Even though I was recently incarnated as a scientist I struggle to recall who won, with whom and for what. I have even met a few of these winners.

According to Professor Google there are / have been around one thousand Nobel Laureates. This means that England football captains are less common and world cup winning England football captains a positive rarity. In some {most} contexts football is more important and more significant than someone boffinacious. Aside from a few like Einstein, people know the faces of Beckham and Lineker better.

Lhamo Thondup the Tibetan tulku also known as Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso or H.H. Dalai Lama is one of only 14 reincarnations. To many in the world he is a high kudos being and his face is easily recognised. He has met Bush, Obama, Cameron and Merkel inter alia. It is good PR to be seen in his presence. He is a spiritual big cheese. He gets invites.

People can speak in awe of people like Friedrich Nietzsche. You must be brainy to read him. Strangely he played a big part in my interest in Buddhism

“Goodreads” attributes the following quotations to Nietzsche.

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“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”

“Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.”


― Friedrich Nietzsche

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In academic circles it is more accepted to quote him than Padmasambhava. The latter is a very high kudos figure in Tibetan Buddhism, a supposed Nirmanakaya of Buddha.

Many big cheese are also legends in their own lunchtimes, others are not, they are humbler than that. In the UK, research assessment exercises have sought to measure peer esteem or kudos. This is such a subjective thing and wholly non scientific yet those keen to get research grants played along with something close to a convenient heresy.

The ascribing of kudos is a very personal and hence subjective thing too. We have the phenomenon of fans who attach much kudos to their heroines or heroes. They may even pay for used clothing or bath water. Kudos is attached to corporeal relics of saints and Buddhas. The essence which may have once imbued the relic is long departed. Perhaps saints have way more than eight fingers and two thumbs so everyone can get a relic.

Despite the positional power which kudos affords in a socio-political sense it is not real. You cannot measure it with a laser and a detector. When you die you can’t take it with you.

People can make huge faux pas dancing upon the minefield of kudos. Kudos is another word for something we desire in a social-construct sense. We may seek recognition or affirmation from the herd, the shoal. Even if we are awarded with a measurable trinket, kudos is impermanent. One can fall from grace off one’s glittery platform shoes like Gary did. A fall from the lofty heights of kudos is difficult to bear.

We may hold things important which others do not. We may fail to attach importance to something revered by others. We may be arrogant in our notions of what is significant and to which we ascribe our personal kudos.

Trying saying kudos, kudos, over and over!! Very quickly is starts to sound silly.

Some people want to become important, significant big cheeses. Some imagine they already are. Many have a sense of grandiose entitlement.

Just as some want to be top dog others want to be a big cheese.

“If you thought $30 for a pound of blue cheese was expensive, wait till you hear how much this Spanish blue cheese just sold for.

Clocking in at $6,682 per pound, a wheel of Cabrales blue cheese from northern Spain earned the title of the world’s most expensive cheese after a 2.2 kg (4.85 lb) wheel was sold at auction for €30,000 ($32,408.10).

The auction took place at the 51st annual Cabrales Cheese Competition held in the Principality of Asturias. Bidding started at €3,000 and quickly rose as passionate turophiles battled for the right to own the first-place cheese.

In the end, restauranteur Iván Suárez won the prized wheel. Suárez told Spanish news outlet EFE that “the passion for the land” and “recognizing the work of all the cheesemakers” made him buy the cheese.”

New Record for World’s Most Expensive Cheese Josie Krogh | August 29, 2023

Burning House – Pots of Honey – nagal’s Courier – Tim – Dream 06-06-2025

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Here is last night’s dream.

The dream opens in a large, several storey, mansion like house. The house is in London and it is full of people milling around. There is a sense of there being former colleagues there, though I cannot identify any individuals. There is a mild chaos and a mild sense of consternation heading towards panic. There is much ado.

Somewhere in the building a fire has started. There is a growing warmth, heat and smoke. People are even more directionless and flapping about. I notice a pair of double fire doors with Fire Exit written upon them on a green panel. I press the bar to open the doors and start to shout and usher people outside to safety. For some reason they have lost the plot and it is my calm that helps them make good the exit.

I can see that the fire is not yet very serious but is in the process of worsening. I am cool calm and collected. I go back inside the building. I can see two fair sized terracotta amphorae. I put one hand in the neck of each of these and lift them up from within. I calmly carry the amphorae out of the building to the fire assembly point. I set them down on the ground and pull out my hands which have been immersed in the amphorae. A rich light golden honey flows off my arms and hands and back into the necks of the amphorae. For a long time, honey flows off my forearms and hands into the amphorae. I know that there is nectar in the honey and that both my hands are fully immersed and coated with that nectar-honey. I enjoy the sensation of flowing honey.

The scene changes and I am walking out of an urban car park at night. I am being tailed by some young men in jeans and with hoodies. They are following me for quite some distance. There are a few of them but two main protagonists. I am unconcerned. I stop and turn. I ask them why they are following me. They say that they have noted that I have something in the back right hand pocket of my jeans. They asks what it is. I say that it is a “special” USB flash drive with a plan, a business plan for Alexandros who is the nagal’s courier, my nagal’s courier. They say that they want me to give it to them. I say that it is encrypted and that only Alexandros and I can read it. They say that they still want it. I explain that it will be for them a Pandora’s box and any attempt at reading it will unleash things they do not want unleashed. They insist. I hand them the USB drive which is in a small black velvet bag with a drawstring closure.

The scene changes and I am in some big faculty like meeting where {big} cheeses are sat around tables in a boardroom style layout. There are more than a dozen people there all smartly dressed. They are aged fifties and early sixties. The meeting is being chaired and convocated by Tim Jones. He has been given this job as being less partial and personally implicated than others. They are to discuss with me what my business plans are, what it is that I want. There is a sense of UK university with some politico-input. I say to Tim that it is more than a little rich that they are finally asking me what I want. How come it is now. He does not know what to make of the situation and is resentful that he has been drawn into it. With no success I try to explain to him and those present that I want nothing, I have no demands. The ball is not in my court – so to speak. I remind Tim that I was pivotal in examining many of his Ph.D. students and was used by him then discarded. Those gathered around the table do not know what to make of it as they are expecting some kind of plan from me, where there is none.

The dream ends.

Ghost Residues – The Unexplainable

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Scanning back through the collection of dreams I have quiet a few with big “cheeses” in, people of historical and cultural import. To my knowledge I have never met any of them on the physical plane. The trajectory of my life turned away from any which might have led me to even come close to contacting them.

My claim to fame is that I once worked in a pub now owned by Rita Ora’s dad. I have met en passant a number of science Nobel laureates and I knew two people who were presidents of learned societies. But that is about as far as it goes. My uncle got an MBE from miliary intelligence during the Malay insurgency, a fact which impressed my housemaster at prep school. He told me Colonel Rees was coming to see me; I had no idea that this was my dad’s half-brother. I did not recognise the surname. I got quizzed by army wives at his funeral, only now do I sense that they may have had intelligence roles too.

There is no readily explainable reason for why I get these “famous” geezers in my dreams when examined from my life circumstance here in the compound. Stretching things past the elastic limit there is a near vanishing possibility that I am under surveillance, given dream content. For some reason that is connected.

There was once, perhaps, a very small possibility that my life could have had wider physical plane significance. So, there may be tiny faint residues of that trajectory left in the web of life. A path not taken leaving an ethereal track in the fabric of maybe. That track, those tracks, somehow leaks into the dreaming.

I am not mithering about these things. Of a night we watch some telly and maybe do a quiz. At the moment we are doing university challenge re-runs. Dependent upon the questions bias I can get anything between two and a dozen questions right. Each morning, I empty the coffee grounds, check what the coypu have been up to and feed the birds. Every afternoon we feed the stray cats and top up the birds.

It is so far removed from famous geezer land and hamster wheel dizziness.

Why then do I have dreams with prime ministers, presidents and high lamas?

I can’t explain it.

Who might crop up tonight, we shall see…

School – Mess – Misunderstanding – Barefoot – NZ Farm Dream 29-01-2025

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This dream was from around 5 AM this morning.

The dream opens in a conference / sports facility which is shared by a female and a male fee-paying private schools. The schools are top end, and the facility is top notch but shared. There is both history and luxury. My team and I are clearing up after a successful course for teenagers from disturbed backgrounds. The course has gone well but our efforts to tidy are hindered by the incredible mess left by the previous users. Trays from the canteen are left partially washed, clogging up the sinks, the bins are full. Most of it is not our mess, but we need to clean it up to hand over to the next users. We struggle to get things sorted. The wife’s open heeled brown shoes have been left in different places. I get them together. It is late afternoon, and the new delegates are arriving. At last, the place is ship shaped, and Bristol fashioned.

The incoming users are a high-level international conference with many big cheeses from academia, government and business. We are just making our way to the school sleeping accommodation. Prof. T and several of his colleagues are entering the atrium as we leave. He comes over to me and congratulates me for being invited to this high-level conference. I explain to him that I have not been invited and nor am I participating. Those are not circles I walk in and I probably never will. He is surprised. I say that I have just done a course for a couple of dozen semi-delinquent teenagers. He does not get it. It does not fit his picture.

We head off to the accommodation blocks and fall tired onto the bed to sleep. It is a long drive back.  During the night I need a piss. There is for us, no ensuite. I will have to use the toilet block down the corridor. I wrap a towel around my waist and go to piss in a big metal urinal.

The scene changes and I am walking around a very muddy farm. I am wearing my combats and a white sports vest. I explore the farm enjoying the mud on my bare feet and through my toes. I know that the farm is a part of the school and conference complex. It provides fresh produce. I know that the whole thing is set in New Zealand.

As I turn the corner I am met by a Kiwi farmer. He asks what I am doing. I explain that I have just done a course at the school. He says that it is a bit strange to see me walking bare foot in all the mud and that it must hurt. I say that because I partially grew up in Oz and Southern Africa that it is normal for me. He turns to a mate and says that all bloody Aussies are nuts.

The dream ends.